VCR of Death

VCR of Death Tapes.

06/23/2026

Rolling into summer like…

Also, there’s a shot at around 11 seconds in this clip where the cars are swerving as the wheelchair goes head on into them. It’s like 2 seconds long but it’s one of the wildest things you’ll see today.

06/22/2026

One more clip of my dad before Father’s Day ends.

06/21/2026

Happy Father’s Day! Here’s a video of two of my dads.

06/21/2026

Pew pew vs candle face.

I had so much fun watching a Fulci flick last night for Fulci Lives Film Week that I’m doing it again tonight. Last nigh...
06/21/2026

I had so much fun watching a Fulci flick last night for Fulci Lives Film Week that I’m doing it again tonight. Last night was Zombie, an unquestionable classic in Fulci’s career. Tonight, I’m headed in a different direction with The New Gladiators aka Warriors of the Year 2072. This is Fulci leaning into dystopian future vibes and both having a lot of fun and trying way too hard to deliver a larger message. The plot is simple enough. It’s 2072 and there are two rival television networks in the world. Each network has had to increase the brutality and violence of their programming to satiate the animalistic public. One network decides to go all the way and stage an updated version of the Roman gladiator games where a bunch of death row inmates will compete to the death on live TV. There’s a bunch of other bits, but it’s essentially The Running Man in Rome. We’ve got Fred Williamson. We’ve got Al Cliver. We’ve got a ton of miniatures depicting a future Rome. The first 20 minutes are extremely solid, but then things start to drift a bit as Fulci and company try to wrangle too many strands of plot. All of it turns out to be weirdly prescient for our current times as we barrel toward a world of monopolistic media companies and AI takeovers. Hold onto your physical media, people! But as fun as it was to find parallels to the real world, most of that comes through in the form of weighty monologues and lengthy depictions of nonsense technology. But fear not, there is still enough here to make this a solid watch, and in true Fulci fashion there is one bit where a laser melts a guy’s face that I will be thinking about for a while. The supporting cast is awesome and the actual scenes of gladiatorial combat are intense and violent. Is it the best double feature with Zombie? Probably not. But it’s still a great example of Fulci turning something average into something weirdly memorable. Fulci lives. 

06/20/2026

Typical Saturday. 🦃

06/20/2026

In the movie Zombie, over the span of 5ish minutes, a topless woman goes scuba diving, takes some fish photos, gets attacked by a shark, escapes the shark, gets attacked by a rogue underwater zombie, escapes him and then the zombie and shark go at it. Zombie bites shark. Shark bites zombie’s arm off. All hail Fulci.

I’ve seen a ton of people posting Lucio Fulci flicks for Fulci Lives Film Week and I thought I’d get in on the act with ...
06/19/2026

I’ve seen a ton of people posting Lucio Fulci flicks for Fulci Lives Film Week and I thought I’d get in on the act with a viewing of Zombie. I always get this movie and Zombie Holocaust aka Dr. Butcher mixed up. This is because they were filmed simultaneously, share some of the same sets, have similar plots and even have multiple actors playing extremely similar roles in both movies. They are both awesome watches, but if you’re like me and get the two confused, just remember that Zombie is the one with the hardest zombie in cinema history. Of course, I am talking about the zombie that bites a goddamn shark in an underwater sequence that is still one of the most insane things ever to be captured on camera. It’s top 10 “holy s**t I can’t believe they got a guy to do this” stuff. Zombie is also the one that features a brutal moment where a woman’s eye is gouged out on a jagged piece of broken-down door timber. The whole moment moves so slowly and patiently that you think she may be saved or she may turn her head or anything. But then the splintered wood starts entering her eye and you’re left gob smacked that someone actually went there. Fulci went there. These two moments exemplify Fulci for me. In every genre movie he ever directed there were moments that outlived the movie itself. Moments that never left your brain once you witnessed them. By today’s standards, most of the gore and violence in Zombie is tame. The Walking Dead made a sport of regularly one-upping the gnarly ways zombies or people were dispatched. But The Walking Dead never had a zombie bite a shark before getting its arm bitten off in kind. Like holy s**t, I could be 120 years old with crippling dementia and I’ll still remember that, even if I don’t necessarily remember the exact movie it came from. Zombie is on Tubi. Give it a watch this weekend and honor a true master. Fulci lives.

06/19/2026

Dear Hollywood, let George Miller make one more Wasteland movie. Also, boomerangs are awesome,

THE WORLD CUP IS HERE! So, I’m reaching for the closest thing I have to a World Cup genre movie and watching The Final G...
06/18/2026

THE WORLD CUP IS HERE! So, I’m reaching for the closest thing I have to a World Cup genre movie and watching The Final Goal. As you can see on the cover art, the tagline reads “his goal was the World Cup.” Sadly though, that tagline is as close as this movie would ever get to the World Cup. The story here revolves around a soccer player (and casual martial artist) named Nick. He plays for a team that is preparing to compete in the “Global Cup.” Only snag is that a bunch of his teammates are taking bribes from Erik Estrada to throw the game. Nick is the only one who can stop the corruption and keep his sport from being forever disgraced. I’ll stop the hype train there. This movie is as rough as you’d assume it would be. Nick is played by Steven Nijjar, a former soccer player/boxer/entrepreneur who has also dabbled with acting in martial arts-based movies. Sadly though, he’s just not a super dynamic leading man, so as he battles Erik Estrada’s goons, it’s just not very exciting. Plus, Erik Estrada walks with a cane and barely ever leaves one boardroom set so he’s pretty checked out as well. There’s not a ton of action and the action that is there is pretty mild. One guy gets burned alive inside a car at one point and it’s such a severe jump in consequences that it really caught me off guard. Instead of action though, we get a lot of soccer footage. We see the team practicing, we see them talking, we see them being suspicious of one another. And for 20ish painful minutes at the end of the movie we follow along with the entire Global Cup game, mostly shot in slow motion at weird low angles to hide the fact that it’s all being shot inside an empty stadium. It’s a brutally boring way to end a pretty boring movie overall. I try to find the good in most everything I watch, but aside from one hilariously cliché soccer coach character, everything in this one was an own goal. If you made it this far, let me know in the comments who you are rooting for in the World Cup,

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